Polish and Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust
Polish and Hungarian Poets on the Holocaust
This chapter highlights Holocaust poetry in Poland and Hungary. The Holocaust was a subject for most Polish poets after the war. Outrage over the mass killings of Polish Jews was voiced by Antoni Słonimski, who spent the war in exile in England and France; the non-Jewish Władysław Broniewski, whose wife Maria died in Auschwitz; and Tadeusz Różewicz, who was a soldier in the Home Army during the German occupation. Meanwhile, the great majority of Hungarian Jews were assimilated and the Holocaust was a greater shock for them than for their Polish counterparts. The losses of Hungarian Jewry in the period 1941 to 1945 included many writers and poets killed in the last months of 1944 or early 1945, among them Miklós Radnóti. Apart from Radnóti at least five other published Hungarian Jewish poets or poets of Jewish extraction lost their lives in the Holocaust. While most Hungarian readers are familiar with Radnóti's life and death, it is a non-Jewish poet whose poems constitute a central part of the Holocaust canon: János Pilinszky. In the early 1960s, the Holocaust re-emerged in the poetry of the next generation.
Keywords: Holocaust poetry, Poland, Hungary, Polish poets, Hungarian Poets, Polish Jews, Hungarian Jews, Jewish poets
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